Unleash the power of the cloud, right at your edge. The latest HPE Edgeline Systems capabilities

Today at HPE Discover, my team and I made very impactful product announcements: the launch of HPE Edgeline Edge-to-Cloud Solutions and the HPE Edgeline Extended Edge Storage. For those who couldn’t make it to Las Vegas, let me explain what these announcements mean to manufacturers, refineries, energy providers, telcos, and others who are making their edges more productive.

A brief history of HPE Edgeline provides some important context. As one of the world’s leading IT companies, HPE is known for servers, storage, and networking, as well as management software and professional services. But we don’t make a set of product, crucial for the edge, which are operational technology (OT) such as sensors, control systems, data acquisition systems, or industrial networks.

But as the Industrial IoT and industry 4.0 began to gain steam, it became clear that our industrial customers wanted to bring IT and OT systems together – not through kluged-together workarounds or low-end IT hardware, but through a convergence far more powerful. Further, it wasn’t enough to adapt an existing datacenter product – the new solution also had to be capable of operating in harsh industrial places, right at the edge of the network.

This was the genesis of the HPE Edgeline Converged Edge System, a first-of-its-kind product line that converges OT and IT in a single box. Integrated right inside are OT systems, which include data acquisition systems, control systems, as well as industrial networks. This enables Edgeline systems to work in a wide range of industrial control, automation, and testing applications. On the IT side, Edgeline systems are equipped with server grade Intel Xeon processors, high capacity storage, and our famous HPE iLO systems management.

You can manage your edge the same way you manage your data center, streamlining your operations and speeding time-to-value

We’ve also worked closely with our OT and IT partners to enable their hardware, software, and platform products to work seamlessly with Edgeline systems. In fact, close collaboration with ecosystem partners helped drive today’s announcements at HPE Discover, taking the Edgeline vision to new heights and delivering several obvious benefits:

First, HPE Edgeline Edge-to-Cloud Solutions enable customers to run unmodified enterprise-class application and management software including Microsoft Azure Stack, SAP HANA, PTC ThingWorx, SparkCognition’s SparkPredict, GE PREDIX, and Citrix XenApp. In other words, the exact same software stack and management tools you run in your datacenter or in the cloud, you can now run on HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems. You don't need to modify them. You don't have to make junior versions or edge versions of them. You don't have to compromise them. You can manage your edge the same way you manage your data center, streamlining your operations and speeding time-to-value. And yes, Edgeline systems are Microsoft Windows certified, Red Hat Linux certified, Citrix certified, and VMware certified – for their data center software.

Third, HPE Edgeline Edge-to-Cloud Solutions and the HPE Edgeline Extended Storage Adapter option kit break down barriers to leveraging IoT, new applications, and data at the edge. If you don’t want or don’t have connections to the cloud, no problem – Edgeline can now run local cloud instances, not to mention numerous other resource-intensive applications which in the past would have been restricted to the cloud or data center.

I urge you to see for yourself how the new capabilities of the HPE Edgeline Converged Edge System can transform operations at your company. In addition to checking out the exhibits at HPE Discover, it’s also possible to visit HPE’s global innovation labs in North America, Europe, and Asia to see our Edge Experience Zones, which are working simulations of factories, smart cities, refineries, and other industrial environments. They include demonstrations of how the Edgeline works with industrial equipment, applications, and platform services from our ecosystem partners, including the vendors listed above.

Tom_Bradicich

Dr. Tom Bradicich is VP and GM for Servers and IoT Systems at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. He was named in Computer Reseller News’ (CRN) Top 25 Disruptors of 2016 and the Top 100 IT Executives of 2016.
Tom is known for managing the introduction of innovative products and businesses, recently creating a new product category “Converged IoT Systems”, with HPE Edgeline Systems, expressly designed for the IoT edge. Tom's data center server products have received an InfoWorld 2015 Technology of the Year Award, the 2015 ARM TechCon Best of Show Award, a CRN 2015 Product of the Year Award, and swept all six categories of the 2016 IT Brand Pulse Leader Award.